The Sounds of Spring!!

Did you ever wonder what the Sound of Silence is?

The kind of silence that you yearn for after a week jockeying the kids back and forth between ballet and soccer. The kind of silence you desperately need when the relatives and their spawn have been visiting for two weeks straight. You know; Baby crying all night with the croup.

THAT kind of silence.

Well then. Where would you want your silence,

 and what would you do with it?

Put on some sweat pants, take the brar off and settle in? Feet up, a cuppa joe, and a good book (I’d like mine with a side of pie, please)? Whisk yourself away to far distant isles and splay on a white sand beach with only the sound of the waves washing the shore to accompany your perusal of sky and water?

Here in AK, we get that kind of silence all winter long.

 At least, it seems like Silence.

The heavy, softly falling silence of huge snowflakes floating down on and on and on; a whispering silence. It always seems to mean something exciting is coming, in its breathless way. The silence of a moose crunching and munching and snapping willow branches. The dark brittle silence of a 20 below morning. Breathe freezing to eyelashes; Footsteps crunching Styrofoam snow in the twinkling starlight, Silence. 

The kind of silence that highlights the green of the trees against the white and blue-white shadowed snow. The kind of snow thudding off of tree branches, chickadee self-proclaiming silence that makes you happy to be alive and glad to have the time to know it.

THAT kind of Silence.

And then Spring comes. And the Silence is slowly overcome. First just lengthening play-filled snow days. 

Then slowly, creepingly, softly, warmly budding branches over water newly freed. Trickling water sounds impinging upon the ear while work is being done.

Then, suddenly, the sparkling silence is broken by the Thrippp! of a dark eyed junco. Only one at first, precipitately arrived, two weeks ahead of his competition and three ahead of the girls. One new sound so startling in its arrival that it jars you away from the computer and to the window. Impossible to believe. Thrilling to hear. An unabashed one man band!

And then, a few days later, another new sound. This time the high chipping of the Violet Green Swallows, four in all, as they return from southern California to the same yard, at the same time, every year. What you hear is their glad reunion.

 Chip, Chip, hurray!

 So, to accompany the ever increasing trickle of water is trickle trickle thriiipp chip chip chip!! No more, the sound of Silence.

I guess that’s because what we really yearn for is not actual Silence at all.

But a Peace within which to allow body and soul to reunite. A peace in which to make peace. A peace in which to describe to ourselves who we really are, and in which to edit that which doesn’t fit.

This years’ Spring has been so early and so unexpected, that the simple sound of new arrived life is ultimately distracting. It is nearly impossible to sit, to work, when each new moment brings a new arrival and a new song. The music grows from a single voice, to a trio, to a quintuplet…

And suddenly, exuberantly, ecstatically, Spring enters, throwing open the doors, rousing you from your status quo to lean into her like the mast head on a ship; Head thrown up, nostrils wide, hair streaming. SPRING! SPRING! She has arrived, and she is Good.

There’s always room for a little quiet, some other time, right??

Peace is always there to be found. But just like Silence, you sometimes have to listen, and appreciate,

In order to find it.

XXOO!!

Love and Peace,

Lori

Linking up with Really Random Thursday at Live A Colorful Life. 

Ps, none of these images are mine.  Mine look like squirrels chewed them.